Candlelight warms up dark days and nights, melts hearts hardened by cold wind and colder thoughts. Candles feature in solstice celebrations that have lifted spirits for centuries. The welcoming village, the holiday stories, the light of the fireplace and the smoky smell of it, the wood fire cooking traditional foods. These images burn in collective memory. They carry humanity through conflict and scarcity. Celebrations can jolt us from the amnesia that makes us forget the things we have in common. Light emanates from churches, temples, campsites, and shelters uniting us to hope that the first flower of spring will arrive.
I’m thankful that 300 years after the Treaty of New Echota was signed, the American Congress is considering seating Kimberly Teehee as a delegate from the Cherokee Nation. It shouldn’t have taken this long. Not every tribe gets a seat at the table, albeit a non-voting seat. But it is a step.
I am grateful to Deb Haaland, Interior Secretary, for her support of Native language recovery, a reversal of the agency’s historic efforts to destroy Native culture. Throughout history, language has kept subject cultures alive, preserved the dignity of their peoples, and fostered a richer experience for all.
They flew in shield shape, banking together. Not a bird was out of formation. The fluid group landed in a mulberry where they plucked juicy fruit, bringing the tree to life with their acrobatics and mid-air high jinx.
Such handsome fellows, masked like robbers, with subtle rusty red and muted yellow highlights on their mourning dove grey cigar bodies.
My camera disrupts them, but not before I have a picture. A silent order travels through the troupe, wings flutter together, they move with one mind. They will be back; they have no choice. It’s how they earn a living.
Acnestis. It’s the itch you can’t scratch. There, between your shoulder blades. A complaint that won’t leave you alone. A retort you don’t think of ’til it wakes you at night, meanly appropriate and well deserved by the jerk who prompted it. Destructive fake facts based on dystopian fantasies.
You can’t scratch that itch because: the complaint can never be satisfied, your retort is not suitable for work, the lie is one of many seeking freedom from being scratched.
Define the parameters and set up a fair fight. Keep scratching until truth bleeds through. You’re not the only one itching.
“Merciless Indian savage.” The Declaration of Independence contains these hateful words.
I did a double take when I saw the phrase emblazoned on a tee shirt in Southwest Alaska. The dark-haired girl wearing it was laughing with a friend. Her bright eyes and brilliant smile offered a refutation to the offensive words.
Contrast the clutch of fishermen on the ferry who bristled with antipathy as a Native man walked past. I stared at them, a witness. Spoke as an ally when the local clinic turned away a Native who needed emergency treatment. The founding fathers got those three words wrong.
Offer: Votes counted, recorded
Wanted: Respect the process
Wanted: Respect the poll workers
Wanted: Respectful governance
Offer: Divisive grandstanding
Wanted: Cooperation, infrastructure fixes, progress on climate change, social justice, fair wages and workplace equity, election reform, Covid stimulus, policies informed by science
Wanted: Problems solved
Offer: Solutions denied
Taken: by “fake news”
Offer: More of the same
Wanted: Critical thinking
Offer: Knee-jerk opposition
Taken: The path of least resistance
Taken: in by divisive grandstanding
Given: More of the same
Offer: Both sides media
Wanted: Fact based media
Wanted: Fact based politics
Wanted: Starting now: communicate, listen, empathize, come together.
There was a fight about money after my father’s funeral, though money played no part. The details don’t matter. Proximity: same car, same hotel, same any building and we erupt. It would have been a ruckus except our husbands intervened. My sister pushed a finger at my chest. Ghosts burned through me. We could have been scrambling over sharp-edged furniture into the emergency room.
The argument was predictable, something to schedule for a convenient time. A time free of hot flashes and cold stares. After forty years of not settling things, the fracas was expected, even anticipated. Not an emergency.
I’m very picky about my okra. So when my daughter tells me to keep what I touch at the Farmer’s Market, I tell her she’s crazy. I will stay picky. The only way to know okra’s good is to touch. Some big ones have the velvety feel of tender youth. Some small ones are hard and almost prickly on the fingers. They are okay in soup or gumbo. But not dipped in batter and fried in the wok.
People look, pull up masks, move. I know, virus. But nobody eats okra raw.
College educated daughter. They don’t teach cooking there.
After a harrowing journey over steep gravel roads, after morning meditation sessions and before soaking in natural hot springs, you devoured Tassajara bread for breakfast. The cookbook made its way to your kitchen, instructing you in the art of turning gloppy sponge into sweet wheat loaves. Mmm… scrumptious with butter, jam and dark roast coffee.
It’s been a long journey enriched by frequent meanderings and yeasty experiences. Learning that satisfaction lies in a perfect translucent stretch of the dough that proves the kneading is done. Bread has secrets. It takes time. Like a good friend, bread must be patiently tended
For the past month, a Tarot card that means reprieve has consistently found its way into my weekly story prompt. Sometimes it defines the question. Sometimes it’s the unknown quantity that might determine the outcome. Either way, reprieve is in the cards.
I find this comforting. Whether a reprieve from a broken Washington, a reprieve through self-knowledge or a reprieve via creative insight, all of it seems good. And I see this theme cropping up in places besides my Celtic Cross spreads. My writing group met on Zoom this week. We are normally very disciplined, sticking to the text of the pieces we are discussing, offering useful comments about improving our stories. This week, the sense of loss evoked in the writing provoked a different response that reverberated through the group.
I find myself wondering how much of it was the fictional stories we reviewed and how much of it was the proximity of loss all around us that bled into our comments. In e-mails after the group, one member revealed that a family member had died of the virus. Another commented that we may need to be prepared for more losses as this pandemic runs its course. And though it is unusual to discuss personal issues in our group, the underlying impetus for much writing is personal loss.
My husband tells a story that may be germane here. A friend of his from college, an English major, saw his first snow during his freshman year at an Eastern college. They were walking across campus, white flakes drifting into piles of white flakes. The African student said, “You know that snow means death.” Such a normal phenomenon across most of the United States is a literary symbol which becomes potent when it overcomes the barriers that we erect against it. Heated buildings, roaring fires, protective snow gear, all the ways that man overcomes nature. Until, as in Jack London’s To Build a Fire, nature overcomes man.
As a culture, we have celebrated rugged individualism. We’ve gone into the wilderness, positive that we would return, sure of being protected from the worst by our pluck, ingenuity, entrepreneurship and free market economy. But some things require a group and to be a group, we need to pull together. We need to listen to the advice of people who know more than we do. That means finding some other song to sing besides America First.
We do need America to come together, but that’s not enough. The virus is here. The means to fight it are spread around the world. Isolation is the first defense. But cooperation can’t be far behind or we risk freezing to death as a result of our own stubborn denial regarding the risks. And unlike a man freezing in the wild, we will take others with us if we can’t admit that we need each other.
There are two versions of To Build a Fire. In one version, the protagonist dies. In the other, he sustains frostbite and becomes a wiser person. We could use a little wisdom as we fight our battle with nature. Reprieve is in the cards, the question is how we go about making that happen and how much damage we sustain before the pandemic is over.
Monica's Monday Morning Flash 